It is well known that binary digital memories have been used as means for locating data associated with an identifying key word--see the publication "Associative Memories," Electronic Design, A. Corneretto, Feb. 1, 1963, pages 40-55. Such memory systems, usually identified as associative memories, consist of two basic memories or subsystems; a search memory and an associated memory. The search memory is that part of the associative memory that contains the descriptive material, search memory words, or designator words that are to be compared with the datum word or search word; while the associative memory contains the data that are particularly associated with the descriptive criteria stored in the search memory. Stated another way, the search memory may contain a plurality of multibit words that describe and are individually related to other individual multibit words that are stored in the associated memory; the multibit search word is compared with the search memory word, as for example when a search function is defined as "locate all the search memory words that are equal to the search words"; the search memory provides an output signal indicative of the address in the associated memory in which the associated data, i.e., the data associated with a particular search memory word is located; and, the associated memory is accessed for the associated data, i.e., the data in the associated memory that are associated with the search memory word that satisfied the search criteria, see the W. W. Davis U.S. Pat. No. 3,387,274. Such associative memory may perform many such functions such as: equal, greater than or equal to, less than or equal to, between limits, next higher, etc.--see the E. Joseph U.S. Pat. No. 3,332,069. Recent associative memories have incorporated the use of large capacity shift register memories to implement the search function utilizing the latest medium scale integrated (MSI) and large scale integrated (LSI) technologies, see the publication "Parallel Search of Shift Register Storage," H. Ruzicka, IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Volume 17, No. 3, August, 1974, pages 807-808. The present invention is considered to be an improvement over these known prior art associative memories.